The Webcomic Manifesto: Conceiving

[Jueves]

The Webcomic Manifesto: Conceiving Truth in the Midst of Fiction

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And then, all of a sudden, you realize it: possibly, there is nothing as
contrived and hypocritical as what has become of the scene of the elusive
art of the webcomic.



[There will be samplings of reality, places and names. But this is not
about labels. So before you question and wonder, I will identify myself as
Andrea B. Previtera, author of a well known and mostly hated comic
which has been among the heavy hitters and has been in print (in Italy),
as well. It has now probably ended both as a strip and a chapter of my
life.]


In the beginning, there are the artists. Exceptions aside, the prevailing
picture of reality can be applied to almost all of the web cartoonists out
there. Who are those artists? They at times term themselves as such.
They stand, humbly, among their fans (who draw fan strips, who write
and read their message boards...) Make no mistake: there is no humility
in them. They may care of their readership, only as much as of their
egos. Often, they will have nothing better to do than draw the strip. They
probably scribble something about it even when they are far from their
drawing boards or their computers. They have no realistic social life and
often the contents of their strip are related to their feeble attempts at
humor or complaining about those very attempts. They actually take
meticulous care to document their life. "Been there, done
that, sympathize with me. This is how I feel today." Perhaps they hope to
catch the attention of a girl, or to build a social life, using an intrinsically
empty premise. At the very last stage of that iterative moral
decomposition, they sell t-shirts, mugs, and "original drawings" to
somehow solidify their experiences, to prove to themselves, above
everyone else that what they are doing is real; that what they are doing
actually means something to the world.


This does not only apply to cartoonists with real skills, able to draw a
panel that's at least visually pleasant; but also to kids that just learned to
draw slightly better than stick figures having sex or drinking beer. And,
naturally, because of this prevailing pattern - reciprocal copying occurs:
everyone attempts to recreate the humor or graphical
style of one of the big shots. See five, six big webcomics, and you've
seen them all.



But that is not everything, by far. Masturbation: the cartoonists are
constantly checking their hits per day; they try to ascend the various top-
tens, they rant about "that other comic getting so much attention", they
bully others about the number of posts in their message boards... And all
of this, in order to gain the attention and fame they
could only dream of in real life, thus turning their hobby into a self-
feeding, self-hollowing obsession.



A special case deserves our attention: Keenspot. One very good aspect of
the Internet, was always a fairly equal opportunity to showcase one's
work, be it a comic strip, music, software, etc. Needless to say, in the real world, syndication destroys this opportunity for comic strips: if you cannot be syndicated, you will not appear in
newspapers; and if you do not appear on newspapers, you will be forever an underdog of the alternative pathways of society. You may have innovative ideas, concepts, yet
you have to accept the basic rules of the syndicates, disemboweling your strip until it conforms to certain standards, until in one way or another, it is politically correct.
This is why you will feel the same atmosphere by reading different strips like The Family Circus or Marmaduke. Did you see "Gattaca"? That feeling. Visually, all those
strips are different, but in their essence, they're not.



Keenspot, in effect, has turned into the Internet Syndicate - Keenspotted comics get all the traffic or most of it. Rarely a comic can emerge if it is not a Keenspot comic.
And interestingly enough, this mostly happens to comics that existed before Keenspot itself. So you could think that Keenspot has its syndication prerequisites, but it is
worse by far: whenever the founders and their posse (four or five guys, really) decide they like a comic, they offer the author to join Keenspot. Even worse, there is the
morbid rule that when a Keenspotted author quits his comic to make another one, the latter will be Keenspotted, as well. Quality, consistence, and continuity - such things
do not matter: the author is part of the clan, and thus will be plugged, and plugged, time and again.



The ultimate evidence? The cartoonist known as "Eight", who has been drawing "Road Waffles" for about over a year now. Keenspot founders claimed that one of a
Keenspot comic's main prerequisites is continuity - Road Waffles has been on hiatus for months. Afterwards, Eight started another comic that took RW's place, and again
began drawing a comic or two per month. Later, he replaced that comic with the current one, BloodLark, which after a couple months of regular run, vanished, as well. Do
note that Eight keeps his solid Keenspot position, keeps selling items, and keeps whining and complaining on his board.



With these interesting factors influencing the scene in mind, it's time to analyze a few of the major webcomics, and the persons responsible for them.



PVP (http://www.pvponline.com) by Scott Kurtz

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Scott is constantly ranting and raving about someone else. Scott rants when someone rants against his rants. He ridicules other comics; he can send subtle offenses to
certain "particular" communities (the "furry" people, just to mention the most recent one). Interestingly enough, he won't take any, himself. When I criticized him (quite heavily), he was ready to *sue* me. Talk about a knee-jerk reaction.



Penny Arcade (http://www.penny-arcade.com) by Tycho and Gabe

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Tycho and Gabe display huge news posts almost every day. Most commonly, they are full of attacks towards this or that, ("this" and "that" most often being other
webcomics that are obviously inspired by theirs - something the guys cannot accept). They seem to take an approach of "copyright infringement" to any other imitation of
their style, created by admiring fans. A clear example is their forum, where every thread that tends to go against their opinions, is instantaneously blocked.



ESCAPE! (http://www.escaped.it) by myself

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The cartoonist does not take himself completely seriously, using irony heavily, (claiming himself to be a "Calvin Klein Pornstar", for example) and this may have worked in
his favor, if it was not for the fact that in order to gain the attention of his readers, he makes a webcomic which makes fun of handicapped people, cancer, religion, and now
and then he attacks other comics, this often causing the authors of other webcomics to lose control (see Scott Kurtz). Lastly, (being an obvious side effect of the
personality of his comic), his message board is filled with the sickest minds of the net, minds that he guides to deluded "crusades" without thinking for a second that an
author must constructively interact with his readers, not lead them to pointless self-destruction.



Dave Kelly (http://www.liviningreytown.com, http://www.lizard.com and others)

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His life matches closely with the webcomics he does. This becomes clear just by looking at the amount of material he produces. He is strongly convinced that he will
make a living off his comics or at least his graphical skills but he just is not able to draw. Instead, he must yell at everyone, flooding boards and IRC channels with
exaggerated monologues about how skilled he is, links to his work, and so on.



Life's So Rad (http://www.lifesorad.com) by Corey Marie Kitley

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The comic almost makes no sense. The art is incredibly poor, and the story is all about the author's life. This girl is seriously afflicted by some self-absorbed syndrome.
Her comic is clearly on Keenspot because someone on the staff physically liked her; and with this, the picture of KS should be complete...



To finish this brief essay I will point your attention toward the worst attitude of the said big shots of the web comic world: they are all packed, Keenspot or not, to preserve
their elite status by linking to each other. How many big web comics link to the lesser, more talented ones? Can you spot one? (No pun intended.) Goats links to
Superosity, that links to WIGU, that links to DieselSweeties, and I am sure that you already have heard of all of these. None of them is an unknown, little comic struggling
to gather a few readers. And there are a lot, believe me, a lot of webcomics that are either incredibly amusing or deeply insightful. Their authors simply did not get graced
by the holiness of Keenspot, or simply don't have money for a real .com, or .net domain, and are thus relegated to the dump yards of geocities, tripod, not having the time
or ability to promote themselves with banners. Why, then, do the Big Ones suffocate all the lists with their names?



With this, I will finish and will leave you with some thoughts to consider. You may or may not agree with what I wrote, so I'd like to hear your thoughts on this.



So long, for now,



Andrea B. Previtera

This essay was meant to bring light to various issues surronding keenspot and keenspace at the moment. Now we would like to hear from various webcomic artists, critcs, readers etc. If you want to participate in this on going discussion you can reply/post directly to the author at http://escape.atp.cx/viewtopic.php?t=130
or we can continue this disscussion here at this board.

[-Yanagi-San-]

I agree with a lot of what you said about Keenspot and the others (especially PvP), but in the last part, you mentioned keenspace in the same breath. However, with keenspace comics, any shmuck can sign up for a keenspace account, and anyone hosted off keenspace automatically gets a bad rep. (such as being called the "crap of the webcomic world") And I truely don't know how well geocities/tripod/etc. comics do, except that I had an ok following back on the 3 months I was on geocities. The bandwidth issues were turning away readers, and so I moved to keenspace because, hey- free hosting without bandwidth limits is nice, even if it does get a little screwed up around here sometimes. ^^
Oddly enough, my links are ecclectic, and I run a link exchange to help promote mutual "plugging" and such, because webcomicking is a community, no matter where you are hosted. Just like everything else though, it all gets broken up into classes, which is why some communities get hostile, or individuals who have no "community" choose to "rough it" and get bitter. It's funny, but these forums are the equivalent of "going to the bar with the guys after work". ^_^ And it's a nice community here, for the most part.

**I think I'm leaning toward going off topic here, so I'll shut up now. ^^;**

[Jeffy]

after reading jueves' post and before readin Yanagi's post, i must say that, while i agree with a few things, it seems almost everything, if not everything you wrote, is based purely on opiion. not only that, but your criticisms of specicic comics place you in the same category of the authors and people you werte complaining about.

i might have more after i get home and read thru the post again, and after i read Yanagi's post, but right now i just found out my 4 hour class was quasi-cancelled, so i'm gone! weeeee!

[ZOMBIE USER 7782]

I have a great deal to correct you on.

A lot of what you wrote is opinion, not fact, poorly researched. Much of it is blatantly INCORRECT. You rely on vast, sweeping and unfair generalisations. (Oh, and your writing style sucks.)

I could go on a sentence-by-sentence rebuttal here but that would waste my valuable time. Here are a few of your most glaring transgressions:

Keenspotted comics get all the traffic or most of it.

Mac Hall. PVP. Megatokyo. Penny Arcade. Sluggy Freelance. Polymer City. Not to mention everything that's ever become popular on Keenspace...

they try to ascend the various top-tens, they rant about "that other comic getting so much attention", they bully others about the number of posts in their message boards

Give three examples. Go on, I dare ya.

They have no realistic social life and often the contents of their strip are related to their feeble attempts at humor or complaining about those very attempts.

That's a slanderous generalisation. How many of these guys do you know? What do you know about their social life if all you have to go on is their comic strip? How many of these strips have you even read, man? Sure, some - even many - of them do fall into the cliche of complaining about their own humour being poor. But not ALL of them. Not even half. Check your facts, and give credit to those who put the effort in.

See five, six big webcomics, and you've seen them all.

Ignoring for the moment the fact that this is plainly incorrect, the point you were making by this was that all webcomics try to copy the most popular ones. Again, this is true in a moderate number of cases but the vast majority of people are merely inspired by these comics; they go on to create stuff out of their own heads and on their own topics. I defy you to find a comic that copies the content of Sluggy Freelance. It can't be done, because it's just that good.



StickManSam is NOT best pleased.

[Jeffy]

asi mentioned before, i was going to re-read the post and elaborate on my response, but since i couldn't access the forums until a minute ago, i was able to read Sam's reply and have decided it'd just be redundant for me to post when it'd likely turn out almost exactly like what Sam posted, i bow to your wisdom StickManSam

[Sidwood]

Where do you get off, jueves?

[Sidwood]

I, too, could go on about the faults in your so-called "manifesto," but I would just be repeating StickManSam.

[ZOMBIE USER 12476]

jueves, you also leave out the people who just plain don't care about popularity. I make comics because making comics is fun and makes me happy. It's fun to create characters and put them in situations and make jokes. It's fun to try new things artistically. My comic is only just starting, but I have to say, I'm satisfied with just updating, creating, and hanging out on forums discussing comics. I'm not looking for popularity, I'm looking for fun.

I think that the best comics are always the ones where the cartoonist has fun doing it. When he/she is having fun with it, their heart is in it and they try hard to be original and innovative.

Your post was very hypocritical. You complain that all cartoonists do is complain that they aren't popular enough and flame other, more popular cartoonists. Isn't that what you did to PA, PvP, Sluggy, etc.?

I have a few friends who enjoy those comics. And isn't that what comics are all about? Enjoyment?

Lighten up, enjoy making comics, and try to have fun. If you don't enjoy making comics because there are people who could be better than you, stop making comics. Your heart won't be in it, and you will become another angry cartoonist, if you aren't already.

Let's not turn this into a flame war, now... Just post what's on your mind, and move on.

[ZOMBIE USER 12015]

Let's not turn this into a flame war, now... Just post what's on your mind, and move on.

Alright: First, I really wish I hadn't had that extra piece of pizza! Huzzah am I stuffed! Second: I REALLY need to get at clipping my toenails. I'm about to have to buy some open-toed shoes fer real yo! Third: Depends aren't the total leakage protection they propose. Anybody got a wet-nap? I don't have that "oh-so fresh" feeling. Fourth: If you REALLY think about it, those worms aren't "spinning" silk, they're shitting it! Silk clothes are made from worms butt-stuff!

[Cindermain]

[ZOMBIE USER 12015]

Don't you look at me that way mister! Like you don't wonder or think the same kinds of things! And by the way, back from vacation are we?? I don't believe I APPROVED that leave of absence bee-otch!

[Cindermain]

Don't you look at me that way mister! Like you don't wonder or think the same kinds of things! And by the way, back from vacation are we?? I don't believe I APPROVED that leave of absence bee-otch!

AH! It's the BOSS!

Hey, WreckedHead is BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN! "Baby he was bo-orn to puuuuuun..."

BTW - I'm still on vacation!! Can't you see I'm wearing flip-flops?! 8)

[ZOMBIE USER 12015]

Don't you look at me that way mister! Like you don't wonder or think the same kinds of things! And by the way, back from vacation are we?? I don't believe I APPROVED that leave of absence bee-otch!

AH! It's the BOSS!

Hey, WreckedHead is BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN! "Baby he was bo-orn to puuuuuun..."

BTW - I'm still on vacation!! Can't you see I'm wearing flip-flops?! 8)

Yeah and those uh.. "Smurf" boxers are really cute. Either that's handy smurf on the fly hatch, or you need to get somethin' checked out quick

[:Razi Oak:]

That was long, so I didn't read most of it.

In summation; I should be more popular.

[Wiebe]

You mean I was supposed to READ all that!?

[Heffaloop]

*did not read it either*

Stopped as soon as I realised how fucking long it was

[:Razi Oak:]

Hey, my summative is all you need to understand it.

Basically, its saying that unpopular comics that tackle non-conventional topics who update regularly should be popular.
So; us.

Therefore my afore-mentioned statement is true.

[ZOMBIE USER 12411]

This does not only apply to cartoonists with real skills, able to draw a
panel that's at least visually pleasant; but also to kids that just learned to
draw slightly better than stick figures...

*LunaSea is DESTROYYEEEEEED* I'd assure everyone that I can draw.... but I know I can, so I don't need to prove it to anyone ^_^

MWAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.

Reading that manifesto took 3 minutes of my life I wish I were smart like Heffa >.< It was interesting....not as interesting as the communist manifesto though...

[Jeffy]

*LunaSea is DESTROYYEEEEEED* I'd assure everyone that I can draw.... but I know I can, so I don't need to prove it to anyone ^_^

MWAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.

actually Luna, i like your stick figures craploads better than a lot of other comics i read... i just can't remember where i first saw something similar to the crazy "full of pointy teeth roundy head" head thinger... i know i saw it someplace, possibly in a cartoon, then i saw it in some other comic which i can't remember and now i saw it in your comic, what the hell...

[Warren]

Can't we all just get along?

Nah... too boring! Bring on the slander lawsuits!

Sometimes it's fun to be small and have nobody know you exist! At least you don't have people whining that you copied them. Especially when there aren't that many original ideas left.

Except for that weird dildo-looking guy in Random Axe of Kindness.